Hey, Suckers -- I Just Got A Hundred Haircuts, Tax-free

Quit your whining. If you had been as clever as I am you would have taken advantage of the calendar to defang the income-tax overbite.

You'd have a tattoo, too.

Anyone paying attention knew that the income tax vacuum cleaner would be switched on Tuesday. Yes, but so would the changes in the sales tax, which -- we are so self-righteously advised -- would help offset the new leeching, shelter the poor, care for the downtrodden, blah, blah, blah.

FOR THE RECORD - Haircuts and pedicures are not taxed under the new state tax structure that took effect Tuesday. In a column on Page A2 of Wednesday's Courant, Denis organ said he had gotten 100 haircuts and six dozen pedicures in September to avoid the tax and save money. He now agrees he scalped himself.

They've reduced the sales tax by 2 percentage points. Great, I thought. I'll save that much on my purchases and snap my fingers under the nose of the income tax man.

But then I did the math. Let's say our income tax is $4,000 per year, a number I pick out of the thin air (so far, tax-free). I can't figure what it will actually be. Anyhow, to save that four grand I have to buy $200,000 worth of goods and services covered by the sales tax. Now, to have $200,000 to spend after paying the mortgage and taxes and tuition and buying food and other necessities means, say, having an income of $300,000, which I do not. Hey, if I had an income of $300,000 I wouldn't give a hoot about a slight tax increase.

But wait. If I had that $300,000 income necessary to cover the purchases required to offset the $4,000 income tax it actually means that my income tax would be $13,500, which means that I have to spend $675,000 on . . .

Well, it's all impossible to do. I can't win that way.

Then I tumbled to the tattoo tax. They expanded the sales tax to all sorts of new things. Including tattoos. By buying things before the tax kicked in, I saved a fortune; by getting inscribed before Oct. 1 with a nifty four-color panorama of Lowell Weicker addressing the General Assembly with Bill Cibes at his side (which

cost extra, a lot extra), I didn't pay a penny in tax. If you waited to get decorated, it'll cost you plenty under this odd tax program of ours. (This closes an old tax loophole, as everyone knows that tattoos are much the rage among the very wealthy who, after boozy sessions at the salons and saloons painting the town rouge end up at the tattoo parlor. "I'm Your Bubble Belly Mamma," one doyen of the Fairfield set is known to have had her derriere inked. "[Expletive] happens -- but not to me," reads the tummy of a Greenwich tycoon, with happy faces galore.) Obviously the state will take in zillions with the tattoo levy. Why else would they put it in there? They're not dunderheads, are they? Obviously, also, they thought there is big money in comfort station and restroom operations because even those are taxed now. I got ahead of that one as well. So too with massage parlors and dating services and escort outfits and burlesque shows, now subject to the tax. I did them like crazy, although I had little luck explaining away my fiscal foresight to a cold-eyed wife -- who also impractically declined the Megadeath tattoo I suggested for her. It clashes with her Harley-Davidson logo.

I got ahead of the windfall expected from the new tax on bookies and bookmakers, betting my money in September before the state confiscated it in October. Fortunately, I did not buy a "new motor vehicle powered solely by natural gas" -- those things used to be sales-taxed but no longer are. You know how many "new motor vehicles powered solely by natural gas" there are driving around, quite a few, surely, to have commanded the attention of the tax writers.

To beat the tax collector, I got a hundred haircuts and six dozen pedicures in September alone, and if I now have a head like a dolphin and can no longer pick up small items with my toes, well, I got clipped and snipped by someone other than the state.

It was to my tax-timing advantage to join clubs early-on -- yacht clubs, country clubs and bridge clubs, even though I own no yachts, countries or bridges.

Trampoline jumping is now a taxable offense, but I did my hopping before the tax agents spread out to collect the new fee on what I guess must be hundreds of trampoline-jumping establishments. I didn't need the fortune teller to tell me that I would need debt counseling services, although taxes are now in effect on both -- the latter, in the matter of taxes, being nearly inevitable.

If it moves, or jumps, it is now taxed -- but I got in ahead of so much of that. Any fool can sit around and wait for the taxes to hit; it takes a very special fool to figure out how to live with a system like this. Or, maybe, to have devised it.